What is materialism’s material? Thoughts toward (actually against) a materialism for “world literature”

Etherington, Ben

doi:10.1080/17449855.2012.720801

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Although frequently homogenized due to the intense processes of conquest and colonization that took place on its islands, the Caribbean represents a diverse multilingual and multicultural space whose heterogeneity and commonalities have been frequently grounded in its materiality. As Ben Etherington (2012) explains regarding the works of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, a Caribbean literary tradition of rootlessness and errantry problematizes Western ideas of the material as a universal category (p. 545). More importantly, Glissant (2010) recognizes in these nomadic elements the importance of the interconnectedness of matter for tropical ontologies, affirming that, after European attempts to exterminate the indigenous populations, the "Antillean soil could not become a territory, but rather a rhizomatic land" (p. 146).…”

Section: Olive Senior: Materialist Voice From the Tropicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry

Martínez

2022

eTropic

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While toxic substances continue increasingly, and unevenly, infiltrating the world, the new materialist turn invites us to examine the relationalities emerging between pollution and literature. This essay examines how Olive Senior’s poetry collection Gardening in the Tropics portrays the imposition of waste and toxicity on Caribbean islands and the counter-narratives to toxic politics that emerge from non-hegemonic perspectives. The paper utilizes methodological contributions from the fields of waste studies, postcolonial and material ecocriticism, and addresses the need for more scholarship centering toxicity in cultural studies, especially through the lens of tropical materialisms. Moreover, the research engages with theorizations surrounding the concept of the Wasteocene as a novel interpretative framework. The main findings reveal that the poems “My Father’s Blue Plantation”, “The Immovable Tenant” and “Advice and Devices” identify how extensive pollution is enabled and perpetuated by colonial systems. The poems illustrate the environmental and socio-political tensions prompted by toxicity, its deleterious effects in organisms and landscapes, and embody how guerrilla narratives can confront widespread toxicity.

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Section: Olive Senior: Materialist Voice From the Tropicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry

Martínez

2022

eTropic

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“…10 Literature by this account, as Ben Etherington has argued, is studied 'as a special encoder of those conditions' which structure the global literary field and, in turn, the objective of critique is to uncover 'the material base through the superstructure of literature' . 11 World literature, following postcolonialism in its materialist, second wave articulation, can be read as a manifestation of the more fundamental modern global capitalist and imperialist world-system. This is an approach that finds its clearest articulation to date in the recent manifesto by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, in which it is argued that the world-literary text will 'register' the capitalist world-system.…”

Section: Lorna Burnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism

Burns¹

2021

The Work of World Literature

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This essay identifies in the materialist strand of world literature theory, especially Pascale Casanova and the Warwick Research Collective, a reliance upon a priori structures (the world-system) and prioritisation of the literary registration of inequality. By contrast, I contend, world-literary critics who wish to maintain the dissident spirit of postcolonialism ought to demonstrate a shared equality. By reference to the philosophies of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay sets out the case for an alternative to world-systems critique: one that maintains literature’s potential for creating new forms of resistance, dissent, and, crucially, equality.

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“…18 However, as one of our principal collaborators Ben Etherington has explained, what the artist has available, what she has to hand in making, is not anything at all. 19 Since the literary material is historical through and through -since, that is, a technique, genre or medium can be worn out as much as a subject-matter -what an artist has to hand in making is not the sum total of all media, forms, genres, techniques, subject matters, production processes, means of circulation; but only those which have not been already used up and emptied of meaning. 20 This means that the 'scope for making decisions is actually extremely narrow'.…”

Section: Take Down Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Making of African Literatures

Zimbler¹,

Bower²

2020

The Cambridge Quarterly

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Manuscripts and songs. Letters and archival scraps. Inscriptions and book collections. Maps, machines and crude oil. Each of the essays in this special issue looks to get a handle on an author, text or set of texts by taking hold of something solid, tangible, sensuous. In his essay on Christopher Okigbo, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma attends to the poet's compositional practice with an ear to his passion for music. Rachel Bower combs through editorial archives and correspondence to examine the ways in which Nigerian poetry has been made by anthologies.Asha Rogers re-reads Richard Rive's short-story 'The Bench' after looking into the author's personal library and opening its books to closer inspection. And in her account of Kojo Laing's bewildering fiction, Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars, Christine Okoth assesses the impact of industry on mapping -real and metaphorical -and on how we imagine Africa's futures. Does this interest in sensuous objects and tangible things explain our use of the phrase 'materials of literature'? Not entirely, though it is certainly striking that the essays elicited by our call for papers are all concerned with the 'stuff' of verbal arts -with voice, paper, ink, body, machine -when, in the initial call, we glossed the term simply as 'matter to hand': as that which is put to work in acts of literary making. Similarly, though we gave no special weight to archival research, this is central to three of the four essays, while the fourth, Okoth's, reflects on the means by which books are transported and stored. Perhaps this unanticipated congruence has to do with the fact that, for many literary critics, knowledge about the making of stories, poems, plays and novels emerges most readily from archives, whether these consist of small book collections at prestigious institutions (the case with Richard Rive), curated editorial records (such as the Howard Sergeant archive explored by Bower), or personal papers held by relatives (the case with Christopher Okigbo -at least at the time of Suhr-Sytsma's research). This is not because such archives are deemed repositories of foundational truth, but because contact with physical stuff, which can be handled, photographed, watched and heard (and which often parches the throat, dries the hands, leaves eyes and neck aching) produces a particular sense of the materiality of the verbal arts.Research in the archive also fosters an awareness of the many and various kinds of labour involved in the making of literary works. This is important because, from the outset, materials of literature has meant, for us, a good deal more than that which writers, readers and critics are able to apprehend visually, aurally or haptically (to say nothing of the ways in which paper and ink can be smelled and even tasted); a good deal more than those processes of production, circulation and reception that leave their traces in business correspondence, marketing brochures, newspaper clippings, invoices and accounts. It has also meant the stuff of language and literary culture: words and the...

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What is materialism’s material? Thoughts toward (actually against) a materialism for “world literature”

Cited by 10 publications

References 8 publications

Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry

Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry

World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism

On the Making of African Literatures

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